Canadian Humanitarian NGO & Canadian Lobster Fisherman involved In Water & Drip Irrigation Community Development in Mali, West Africa. Living Stories. Listening To Stories. Looking for Moments & Memories. Writes very poorly, and is oh so struggling to balance two very different lives.

When Angels Beg

The “Tomato Can Kids“ are students of unregulated Koranic Boarding Schools in Mali. They usually consist of kids that look like this one. There are hundreds of them around my town. I’ve written about them several times already, so little more analysis is coming here.

This is only a reminder to never forget the angels.

In the hot afternoon sun these “angels” sleep by the dozens in the hallway and on the steps to my building. Daily I talk to them, greet them, walk around their sleeping bodies, or wade through flocks of them. After five years it is very easy to become numb or desensitized to their sever plight, due to familiarity.

All I know is these children are not really in school, it is a facade. If the children are actually taught a little in the mornings before being sent out to wander and beg for their food, money, for anything for that matter, it is to memorize and recite Arabic Koranic verses, while no other subject is taught. They simply wander most of the day, begging. Anything you give them is taken back to their teacher anyway, the kids keep nothing.

“It is dangerous to ask for advice. It is even more dangerous to give advice.” – Paulo Coelho

What I do know is this;
Kids in boarding schools should not be begging,
shoeless,
laying asleep on the streets,
wandering unsupervised,
hungry,
dirty,
poorly clothed.
Period!

“Old beggars in stories are never really old beggars,” Simmon said with a hint of accusation in his voice. “They’re always a witch or a prince or an angel or something.”

“In real life old beggars are almost always old beggars,” I pointed out.

J. R.R. TOLKIEN – PEACE IS NEVER FREE

"………….. and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it."
J. R.R. Tolkien "The Fellowship of the Ring" , 1985, George & Allen & Urwin Pub LTD(Page 22-23 prologue)

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Pictures

Photo is attributed as, “The Graves Of A Catholic Woman And Her Protestant Husband Seperated By A Wall, Holland, 1888.”

Bones placed in Animistic Religious Ritual

Jean Claude spreading already fermented coco out to dry.

My son Ted with me on a return trip to Ivory Coast in 2009. His first time back in Ivory coast since his childhood. Coffee drying.

Some of my coco growing friends. A happy reunion in 2009. Man I miss these guys.

90 km In the Bush.Doing Drought Season Drip Irrigated Gardens.

View From the Pier in Segou.

Farming tools have not changed for these people for 300 years.

Our orange lady, who passed away.

By the Baffond on Niaradougou. By the Potato fields.

Road to Bankagooma Land

Storage Granery for Millet to feed the family though 9 months of drought in Sahel.